At first the clippings telling of strange encounters with even stranger creatures seem to be obvious hoaxes . . . But after a while the sheer weight of the material begins to get to you. Can all of these stories have been hoaxes or hallucinations? Are there that many practical jokers or loonies running loose in the country? Or is there something to at least some of the stories? And finally you begin to wonder if perhaps some night you'll be out alone on a dark road when something totally unexpected, and probably horrible, will come galloping out of the woods toward you.
-- Daniel Cohen, Monsters, Giants and Little Men from Mars (1975)
The heading at the top was the title of a book I saw some years back by Daniel Cohen. I took it as a challenge, and I flipped through the small volume, arguing with thin air that I had, indeed, heard of the creatures therein described.
I began to think, however, that there are monsters, entities, and Things in general from folklore (and maybe even reality) that few people have heard about. So I took up another challenge: to find tales of strange creatures unknown to the average person. Here goes:
"Monsters You Never Heard Of" is growing faster than I expected. I may have to add links to cryptozoological and Fortean sites for those who wish to know more. Maybe articles close to the subject, such as what exactly makes a good monster.
I've decided to turn part of this page into a sort of dictionary of monsters, entities, and cryptozoological critters -- hopefully with entries that, well, you've never heard of. As I've explained on my home page, circumstances are making me downplay my web pages and the Internet in general.
Still, there are certainly some odd things out there; you've all heard of Bigfoot, but what about the grotesque, Mr.-Potato-Head-like Bighead?
Those good monsters are hard to come by, apparently, because I haven't been updating for a while. Still:
Once people started networking on the World Wide Web, they could share experiences, stories, and family histories with others across the globe. Many who do this have noted curious parallels, especially when it comes to odd, inexplicable, "Fortean" events. Find enough people who have witnessed the same "things", and you have a new monster.
See, for instance, the nasty Black-Eyed Kids, who are infamous enough to have a FAQ page.
Then there are The Shadow People. I found this site particularly creepy, because my brother Mark used to tell me about "Mr. Shadow," who only appeared at our grandparents' house in Eufaula, Oklahoma, when he was a kid in the sixties. Mr. Shadow would show up at night, at the doorway of the bedroom we shared, a silhouette somehow visible (darker) against the darkness of the living room. He would wave at Mark, who was lying in bed, and Mark would wave back.
I saw something like Mr. Shadow myself, circa 1967, when we were on a family vacation, driving to Washington D.C. In some little motel, somewhere between Oklahoma and Maryland, I woke with a start to find a black, human-shaped outline bending over me, blacker than the background of the room (streetlights made things vaguely visible, despite drawn curtains). I just grit my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut for the rest of the night . . .
Strange Magazine's "First Person" accounts gives us several bizarre creatures, including the infamous "Giant Shrimp in the Laundry Room."
Once of the most interesting message boards I've seen is the Fortean Times Message Board. I won't be more specific with the hyperlink because sometimes the threads are joined or even removed. The "It Happened To Me!" area is full of monsters and weirdness, as is "Cryptozoology". Look for such freaky Things as "Dog-Headed Men," "Mega-Moth", "The Reptile", and "The Grinning Tickler" (the last found on a thread about evil Raggedy Ann dolls!).
Many "monsters" are seen only once, twice, or three times and then vanish back into the Twilight Zone. Often there is only one witness, and the existence of something Unknown rests on such a person's anecdotal evidence. Reports such as these are certainly not going to advance science, but they are fun to record, and perhaps comparisons of different tales will tell us something, some day.
Bernhardt J. Hurwood, the popular writer on folklore and the occult, tells us of this bear-like monster:
A Tyrolian water demon called the Blutschink was neither a werewolf nor a vampire, yet it had characteristics that related it to both. Appearing at night in the shape of a bear with bloody feet, it seized victims who ventured near the lake in which it dwelt. The Blutschink is typical of numerous other malignant water demons in Europe. They deserve mention here because so many of them are believed to suck their victims' blood, devour them, or at the very least scratch and bite. [pp. 133-134]
Hurwood, Bernhardt J. Vampire Papers (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1976 [1963]).
The famous Ozark folklorist Vance Randolph writes:
One of my best friends told me seriously that as a little boy in McDonald county, Missouri, he once met a spotted hound that was bigger than a cow, and made tracks in the snow nearly two feet across. At the time he was astounded that a dog should attain such a size, but it never entered his head that there was anything supernatural about the animal. It was years later, when he came to realize that there were no such dogs anywhere in the world, he knew that he had seen a "booger dog."
Randolph assumed that his friend made up the story just for him (the famous folklorist), but he learned from the man's relatives and neighbors that he'd been telling of his encounter for over twenty years. Randolph collected tales of similar colossal dogs in the Ozarks, some of which were headless.
Randolph, Vance. Ozark Magic and Folklore (New York: Dover, 1964 [1947]), pp. 224-225.
In 1989 folklorist Patricia Meley began interviewing teenagers in Columbia, Pennsylvania, about "legend trips" -- driving to spots where crazy people, ghosts, or monsters are supposed to lurk, just for something to do in a small rural community (one informant dismissed Columbia with "This town sucks"). An older person had to put his two cents in:
"A thirty-five-year-old Harrisburg man told me that, as a teenager, he and his friends walked to a city graveyard to see 'Fidget Widgets,' creatures that he described as 'outer spacemen.' Teenagers at the Harrisburg Middle School report going to the same cemetery to see the Fidget Widgets, but they claim the scary creatures are video game characters." [p.24]
Various other things reported in the Columbia area include floating blue lights, "half-cat, half-fox" animals that love dashing in front of cars; houses that move or vanish entirely; winds that come out of nowhere, capable of pushing a car off the road; and various ghosts and homicidal hermits. "A group of teenagers referred to 'the night we saw the gas cans.' but when pressed for details, they could not tell me why the gas cans frightened them." [p. 8]
Meley, Patricia M. "Adolescent Legend Trips as Teenage Cultural Response," Mid-America Folklore (Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring 1990), pp. 1-26.
The Australian Aborigines speak of an amphibious creature called the Gauarge. It dwells in watering holes and drags down anyone who bathes there. "It looks like an emu, but without feathers," writes Bernard Heuvelmans.
Heuvelmans points out that this description would fit the Struthiomimus, a slender, bidedal, Cretaceous dinosaur with a birdlike beak. (The Jurassic Park critter "Gallimimus" is a related animal.) Perhaps, trapped on the Australian island-continent, these Ornithomimosaurs ("bird-mimicking reptiles") took to a semi-aquatic life and survive to this day Down Under.
Heuvelmans, Bernard (Trans. Richard Garnett). On the Track of Unknown Animals (London: Kegan Paul, 1995 [1955]), pp. 228-230.
Peter Underwood, the famous British ghost hunter, reports that the country house and estate of Sandringham, Norfolk, a favorite retreat of the British royals, is haunted by poltergeistic phenomena. Footsteps, doors opening and closing, light switches flipping on an off, sheets pulled off newly-made beds -- the usual tricks.
The phenomena concentrate on the servants' quarters and are said to begin around Christmas Eve and continue for several weeks. There is something in the manse that gives off a noise of "heavy breathing," and this entity has been seen: "One footman refused to sleep in the room assigned to him after he claimed to have seen something which he described as 'looking like a large paper sack breathing in and out like a grotesque lung.' He also heard heavy and regular breathing apparently emanate from the curious bulging object."
Disembodied heads and floating hands are known from folklore and legend, but a disembodied lung?
The entity reminds me of the blood-draining "elementals" about which E. F. Benson wrote, most notably in his terrifying tale "And No Bird Sings": "There was no head to it; it ended in a blunt point with an orifice. In colour it was grey, covered with sparse black hairs; its length, I suppose, was some four feet." Although purely fictional, Benson's stories, written a century or more back, often echo modern reports of unusual animal deaths and mutilations. The elementals need physical vitality to manifest themselves, you see.
Benson, E. F. Collected Ghost Stories (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992).
Underwood, Peter. Gazetteer of British Ghosts (London: Souvenir Press, 1971).
The phrase "Rat-King" usually refers to a number of black rats that have somehow entwined and knotted their tails together, rendering themselves immobile. Science writer Willy Ley mentions a different sort of Rat-King:
There is a European legend about a "king of the rats" which is old enough to be untraceable because its roots disappear in the time before printing. But the name was known to Conrad Gesner, the great Swiss zoologist of the sixteenth century. In his book on the four-footed animals, which was printed for the first time in 1551, he said in his chapter on the rat -- after remarking that rats do not need to be described because "to many they are better known than is pleasing" -- that "some say that the rat, in its old age, grows enormously large [so that it can no longer move around] and is fed by the younger rats; it is called a Rat King by our people."
Ley, Willy. On Earth and in the Sky (New York: Ace Books, 1967), p. 28.
Anthropologist and ethnologist James Mooney is famous for his works preserving the traditions of Native Americans. His book Myths of the Cherokee could not have been produced without the help of A'yun'ini, or "Swimmer", a "genuine aboriginal antiquarian and patriot," from whom "nearly three-fourths of the whole number [of Cherokee tales] were originally obtained." [p. 236] One of Swimmer's tales told of Star-Creatures.
"One night a hunting party camping in the mountains noticed two lights like large stars moving along the top of a distant ridge." The lights eventually disappeared over the top of the ridge. They appeared for the next two nights as well, following the same path, and on the morning of the fourth day the hunters climbed the ridge:
. . . after searching for some time, they found two strange creatures about so large (making a circle with outstretched arms), with round bodies covered with fine fur or downy feathers, from which small heads stuck out like the heads of terrapins. As the breeze played upon these feathers showers of sparks flew out.
The hunters carried the creatures to their camp, intending to take them back to their village. At night, the strange beings glowed brightly. They caused no trouble and kept quiet, but on the seventh night of captivity "they suddenly rose from the ground like balls of fire and were soon above the tops of the trees." The Cherokee hunters realized they were stars come to earth. [p. 257-258]
Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee (Nashville, TN: Charles and Randy Elder, 1982). Originally published in the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (1900).
"The Wazooey Man" is a bizarre entity that haunts an arroyo off Red Creek Road, several miles southwest of Pueblo, Colorado. Jim Brandon writes:
Around May 15, 1973, two boys who were plinking with an air pistol in the arroyo one evening gradually became aware, in the fading light, of two huge red eyes. They looked like bicycle reflectors, and with a jolt of youthful ebullience, one of the boys took a shot at them. The next thing they knew, both youths had been picked up and dumped unceremoniously into a nearby ravine by some unseen force. A large wooden fencepost came out of the ground and struck one of them on the head.
The boys ran for their truck but lost the keys somewhere along the way. They started back along Red Creek Road, trying to hitch a ride. Any time they tried to head west -- the direction of the canyon -- however, something like a "mobile haystack" with big red eyes would appear and frighten them away.
The red eyes like bicycle reflectors put one in mind of Mothman. The "mobile haystack" is a little stranger, but perhaps, if West Virginia's famous bogey, with its peepers set into its shoulder-area, were to spread its batlike wings, the silhouette might look, from straight on, like a haystack with red eyes . . .
Brandon, Jim. Weird America (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), pp. 49-50.